Pick a North Star metric

To: CEO and Growth Lead From: Head of Product Subject: Simmer's North Star: Weekly Cooks

Recommendation

Make Weekly Cooks the North Star: the number of unique users who reach the last step of a Cook Mode recipe in a given week. It is the best single measure of the value Simmer delivers, and it predicts both of your goals.

Why Weekly Cooks

• It predicts retention. Users who cook two or more recipes a week retain at 61% at month 6. Save-only users retain at 9%, and browse-only users at 4%.
• It predicts revenue. 82% of new subscribers cooked at least three recipes in Cook Mode in their first two weeks. Cooking is what makes people pay for Simmer Plus, which unlocks the timers they use while cooking.
• It can't be inflated by passive traffic. Browse-only users make up 68% of monthly actives, so MAU mostly measures search arrivals who leave after one recipe.

Why not MRR (for the CEO)

MRR is the outcome we want, but it is a lagging indicator. A subscriber who churns in month 6 still counts in month 1. It also moves for reasons unrelated to product quality, such as pricing changes, promotions and billing. Teams can't reliably act on it week to week. Weekly Cooks is the leading indicator behind it, and it is visible within a week.

Why not MAU (for the Growth Lead)

MAU rewards reach, not value. Last year's "recipe of the day" notification lifted MAU by 6%, but uninstalls doubled and Cook Mode completions did not change. We added people who opened the app and left. That result is the clearest evidence that MAU can rise while the product gets no better. MAU stays on the dashboard, but it should not be the target.

Input metrics teams can own

1. New-user cooking activation: % of new users who complete three Cook Mode recipes in their first two weeks. Owner: Onboarding. This is the subscriber signal from the data above.
2. Save-to-cook conversion: % of recipes saved that are cooked within 14 days. Today, savers who never cook retain at 9%. Owner: Recipe discovery.
3. Weekly planning rate: % of monthly actives who plan a week of meals, currently 7% ever. Planners retain at 54%. Owner: Meal planning.
4. Search-to-first-cook rate: % of search arrivals who cook a recipe within their first visit or the following week. This turns browse-only traffic into cooks. Owner: Acquisition and SEO.

Each input maps to a step in the chain from arrival to cooking to subscription, so each team can see how its work feeds Weekly Cooks.

Guardrails against gaming

• Define a valid completion. Count only unique completions per user per recipe per day, and exclude completions that take implausibly little time, so no one can tap through to the last step to inflate the count.
• Protect the base. Uninstalls and push opt-out rates have their own thresholds. Any change that lifts Weekly Cooks while pushing these up is rejected. The notification test is the case study.
• Keep MAU and MRR as visible health checks. MAU should not fall below its current baseline, and MRR should not grow through discounts that mask churn.
• Check retention, not just activity. Track 6-month retention by cohort. If Weekly Cooks rises but retention doesn't, the metric is measuring the wrong thing.
• Don't gate cooking to hit revenue. Moving Cook Mode behind the paywall would lift MRR in the short term, but it would also cut the cooking that drives both retention and conversion.
• Test causality. The retention and subscription links are observational. We should confirm them with holdout tests, such as nudging a random group of savers toward a first cook, before we commit roadmap bets to them.

Next steps

1. Baseline Weekly Cooks and the four inputs over the last 12 weeks.
2. Agree the valid-completion definition with Analytics this sprint.
3. Run one holdout test on save-to-cook nudges within 30 days.
4. Review the metric and guardrails at the end of the quarter.

To: CEO & Growth Lead From: Head of Product, Simmer Date: October 24, 2023 Subject: Recommendation: Our North Star Metric, Inputs, and Guardrails

Team, a great debate highlights our current tension: the CEO wants revenue (MRR), while the Growth lead wants reach (MAU).

If we choose MRR, we risk ignoring top-of-funnel health. If we choose MAU, we risk celebrating vanity metrics—as proved by last year’s notification test, where a 6% bump in MAU doubled uninstalls because those users didn't actually find value.

My recommendation is to pick a hybrid North Star: Weekly Active Subscribers (WAS), or more specifically, Paid Users Who Cook Weekly.

However, since a single metric rarely satisfies executive reporting, MRR should remain our ultimate business North Star, but Product Value Realization (Weekly Actives who Cook) must be the operational North Star that guides day-to-day product and growth decisions. MRR is the lagging reward; cooking engagement is the leading engine. Here is why, along with our inputs and guardrails.

Why This North Star Works

Our data reveals a stark truth: 68% of our 2.1M MAUs are "browse-only" users with a catastrophic 4-49% retention rate. MAU rewards us for acquiring transient browsers. Meanwhile, users who experience core value—using Cook Mode—exhibit a stellar 61% six-month retention rate, and 82% of our subscribers cook at least three recipes in their first two weeks before paying.

If we optimize for Weekly Active Cookers, we bridge both worlds: we drive the habit loops that naturally convert free users to Simmer Plus, which directly compounds our $840k MRR, while ignoring empty traffic that drains server costs and drives uninstalls.

Three Input Metrics Teams Can Own

To move our North Star, different pods will own specific, actionable input metrics:

1. Activation Velocity (Growth & Onboarding Pod): The percentage of new signups who complete at least one recipe in Cook Mode within their first 7 days. (Tied to the 82% subscriber conversion rule).
2. Core Habit Frequency (Engagement Pod): The average number of Cook Mode completions per active user per week. (Tied to the 61% retention milestone).
3. Feature Expansion (Core Product Pod): The percentage of weekly actives utilizing meal-planning features. (Currently a low 7%, representing massive upside for long-term retention).

Guardrails to Prevent Gaming

Metrics are easily corrupted if incentives misalign. To ensure we don’t repeat the ghost of last year’s push-notification debacle, we will institute three hard guardrails:

• The Uninstall Rate Cap: If marketing or growth initiatives drive MAU/signups up, but the monthly uninstall rate exceeds 2% of our active base, campaigns are automatically paused.
• The "No Empty Calories" Rule for Growth: Growth experiments cannot be measured solely by acquisition or click-through rates. An experiment is deemed a failure if it increases top-of-funnel signups without a corresponding lift in Day-7 Cook Mode completions.
• Subscription Quality (LTV/Churn Check): To prevent the sales team or pricing experiments from pushing low-intent, high-churn subscriptions just to spike short-term MRR, we will track 90-day subscriber retention. If a cohort churns above baseline, the acquisition channel or incentive driving it is depreciated.

By anchoring on users who actually cook, we align the CEO’s revenue goals with the Growth lead's engagement goals, turning casual browsers into loyal, paying home cooks.

To: CEO and Growth Lead Recommendation: Make Weekly Repeat Cooks our North Star.

Define it as the number of unique users who complete at least two cooking sessions in Cook Mode in a rolling seven-day period, across free and Plus. A completion currently means reaching the final step. Count separate cooking occasions, including cooking the same recipe again, but exclude duplicate events.

Why this, rather than MRR or MAU?

Simmer’s value is helping people turn recipes into meals—not simply attracting visits or collecting subscriptions. Repeat cooking is our strongest available signal that we deliver that value consistently.

The retention evidence is compelling: users who cook at least twice in a week have 61% month-six retention, versus 54% for weekly planners, 9% for savers who never cook in Cook Mode, and 4% for browse-only users. Cooking also precedes monetization: 82% of new subscribers cooked at least three recipes in their first two weeks.

Those are associations, not proof that inducing more Cook Mode completions causes retention or subscriptions. Nevertheless, repeat cooking is the best-supported hypothesis to organize around and test.

MRR remains our business outcome. Our $840,000 MRR matters, but making it the product North Star could reward price increases or tighter paywalls without improving customer value.

MAU remains a reach metric. With 68% of monthly actives browsing only, it mixes meaningful use with fleeting visits. Last year’s push test illustrates the danger: MAU rose 6%, uninstalls doubled, and cooking completions did not change.

Weekly Repeat Cooks combines breadth with repeated value. Counting people rather than total completions also prevents a small group of power users from masking weak adoption.

Three input metrics teams can own

Report cohort sizes alongside these rates so improvements cannot hide shrinking reach. Meal planning should be a means to repeat cooking, not a forced behavior: only 7% of monthly actives have ever tried it.

Guardrails against gaming

• Protect measurement integrity. Reaching the last step is a proxy for cooking, not proof. Deduplicate sessions, flag implausibly rapid or automated completions, and audit the proxy through sampled “Did you cook this?” feedback. Never reward shortening recipes, auto-advancing steps, or making completion obligatory.
• Protect user experience. Monitor uninstalls, notification opt-outs, and cooking satisfaction. Set experiment stop thresholds before launch; do not repeat the push test’s trade-off.
• Protect business health and access. Track MRR, paid conversion, subscriber churn, and refunds alongside the North Star. Segment results by free versus Plus and acquisition channel so paywall changes or traffic shifts cannot masquerade as better product value.
• Require sustained impact. Validate changes with controlled experiments and follow-up retention—not just a launch-week lift.

First, establish the North Star’s baseline; the supplied MAU and subscriber totals cannot tell us how many Weekly Repeat Cooks we have. Then set a target grounded in cohort performance.